by Sheryl McCarthy
Newsday
Call it a modern-day Trail of Tears, another chapter in the endless saga of the raping of the American Indian.
Federal district court judge Royce Lamberth this week held Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton in contempt for not complying with his order to correct problems in a trust fund that manages billions of dollars in royalties from American Indian lands.
The department’s handling of the Individual Indian Money trust “has served as the gold standard for mismanagement by the federal government for more than a century,” Lamberth said in a scathing opinion.
Norton became the third cabinet member to be held in contempt because of problems with the trust fund. The others were former President Bill Clinton’s Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.
The Individal Indian Money trust was set up by Congress in 1887, after the government forcibly or by treaty relocated numerous tribes from 90 million acres of their land and gave it to white settlers.
Under the trust, the government allotted land that was set aside for tribes to individual tribe members. Individuals got allotments ranging from 40 to 320 acres, and Interior was given the job of managing oil and gas drilling, grazing, commercial leases, and the removal of resources like timber, lead and uranium. The Indians would be paid royalties for these activities.
For more than a century, however, an undetermined amount of this money has been been lost, stolen, or never collected. About 300,000 American Indians are entitled to royalties from 54 million acres of land. But they might receive a check one month, no check the next, and the government can’t explain why, what the money’s for or even where their land is.
The Department of Interior once hired the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen, of Enron fame, to figure out how much the Indians were owed. But Andersen threw up its hands, saying the records were such a mess that the job was practically impossible.
In 1996, the Indians sued, claiming that the government’s mismanagement had cost them between $10 billion and $40 billion dollars. Since Secretary Norton took over, she has devoted a large amount of the department’s resources to the Indian trust fund. But Judge Lamberth’s patience ran out. He said the department had not only failed to set up a proper accounting system but had deliberately misled the court about its progress.
The Indian trust fund has been called the biggest and longest-running case of government mismanagement in the nation’s history. Bigger than Enron, its villains are not a set of greedy corporate executives, but a government agency with no profit motive that’s supposed to be looking out for American Indians.
Eight years ago, Congress created a special trustee position to oversee the department’s management of the fund. But the first two were forced out when they tried to reveal how badly it was managed.
I’m happy to hear stories about American Indians making a fortune from casinos and tax-free cigarettes. They’ve been the most thoroughly plundered group in this country’s history. Only contempt for the Indians, their lack of political clout and public support for treating them so badly can explain why the government’s abuse of Indians continues to this day.
“They’re like school kids who’re always finding excuses for not doing their homework,” John Dossett, general counsel to the National Congress of American Indians, a federation of tribes, says of the people who run the trust fund.
“Instead, they focus on ‘how do we limit our explosure,’ rather than on ‘how do we get the job done.'”
Creating a truly independent trustee to oversee the fund and requiring the government to compensate the Indians for any money lost because of mismanagement could force the fund to operate the way it should. The government has broken most of its promises to the Indians so far. It’s time it kept a few of them.
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